This is a space for criticism, critique and meta-commentary.
Este es un espacio personal para la crítica y el meta-comentario.
“The dialectical critic of culture must both participate in culture and not participate. Only then does he/she do justice to his/her object and to him/herself”.
Theodor W. Adorno, ‘Cultural Criticism and Society’

This exhibition revolves around an
archaeology of different historical aesthetic forms coexisting at the heart of
recent artistic practices. Rather than starting out from this vast
storehouse-cum-archive of forms that is History, understood as a linear narrative
that stretches from the ‘past’ to the present day, the exhibition focuses on
examples and cases from ‘now’ that use different forms of historicity and/or
historicism. Archaeology, as everyone knows, centres on research into history
and is a discipline based on strict methods of chronological dating, period,
epoch, style, school, etc. Only after archaeological analysis of material signs
and remains is it possible to enter into anthropological studies on who made
what, why and to what end.

One of the underlying intentions of
this group exhibition of work by five artists is to reflect on the
sedimentation of time in highly codified cultural forms that range from the
realm of everyday objects to the configuration of the environment around us,
including the formation of artworks. Architecture, design, the moving image and
popular culture all intermingle in an X-ray of the cultural present with one
eye on yesterday.

There are few cultural productions that
transmit as much codified information to us as the cutting edges of image, art
and design. The diagnosis of the present is stratified to the extent that “one
day we’ll need archaeologists to help us guess the original storylines of even
classic films” (William Gibson, Pattern Recognition, G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 2003).
This sci-fi novel about the advent of new modes of consumption makes its
appearance here like a reference. In a pop-cultural context, what we tend
towards is the recognition of forms, patterns and models. In identifying
ourselves with aesthetic elements, we mould subjectivities. What is going on
here is a contradictory balance between the standardisation of ways of life and
the need for their continual singularisation: a “mirror-world” in which
everything is recognisable without being alike, in which everything looks like
everything else but is different.

The artistic practices of Martin Beck,
Carol Bove, Dora García, Mathias Poledna and Pia Rönicke share this analytical
sensitivity towards the artificial constructs that intersect historical memory
with mass culture, and are part of a tradition of critique that has continued
to question the universal concepts of the aesthetic experience of high
modernism through to the present day. It is in the form, the style and the
language that the differences between the projections of the Sixties to the
present are visible. Style (as residue) in this context is a carrier of the
ideology of the times, dissolving the historical within the aesthetic, midway
between timelessness and periodization.

This exhibition borrows its name from
Fredric Jameson’s book, Archaeologies of the Future: the Desire called Utopia
and other Science Fictions (Verso, 2005), a title that is an entire programme
in itself. Nevertheless, its origin lies in the conclusion of the author’s previous
book on modernity and modernism, A Singular Modernity (Verso, 2000), when he
writes that “Ontologies of the present demand archaeologies of the future, not
forecasts of the past”.

This exhibition as a visual essay is an
attempt to short-circuit the archaeologies of the past (those of modernity)
with a scenario of historicism close to science-fiction.

Another of the notable features lies in
the methods used by all the artists, which include appropriation, quotation,
re-contextualisation, revision, design, reference and self-reference, and
manipulations of style, with culture being read as a second nature.

8/30/2007

This year Lyon Biennial will feature a colaboration with Juan Pérez Agirregoikoa. Under the title '00s - The History of a Decade That Has Not yet Been Named' artists are chosen in relation to a selected group of curators. I decided to work close with Juan, an artist born in San Sebastian and based in Paris since early 90's. The experience will be reported, or not.
Image: Juan Pérez Agirregoikoa, 'Anti-marxist workers', drawing, 2006.

Under certain light conditions, objects change their aspect. A red light, a dark room, and everything is upside down.* Under specific luminal irradiations, bodies are transformed. Day and night. Daylight and nightlight. The eye is photosensitive to darkness. Reflections of the anti-sun.
The artists in this exhibition use darkness as a backdrop. Mysterious images come out of that depth: faces, silhouettes, atmospheres, sounds, and animals, too. Little by little, a feeling of stillness takes over the spectator. Straddling action, non-action, as stasis, the scenes are partly pre-determined, or literally organised to make something happen. A basic script is organising the image in movement. The cohesion of the image is achieved by effect of the filmic tempo. Duration gradually provides the image with consistency, bringing to the fore a fold hidden in what is nearest, which, when looked at in detail, reveals a strangeness that was already there, on the other side of the real.

5/23/2007

Please join us to celebrate the launch of Casco Issues X on Wednesday 23 May, with a new performance, ‘Affecting Abstraction, Part Three’ by Falke Pisano.
Edited by Basque writer/curator Peio Aguirre and Casco’s director, Emily Pethick, Casco Issues X addresses the question of methodology in artistic practice, thinking about the presence or absence of methods, their ideological connotations and historical backgrounds, in order to examine some of the conditions that surround contemporary art production.

To think about method implies a reflection on the working procedures that all of us employ in our activities, and the – hidden or visible – processes that enable something to come into being. Where as in science the rules of investigation, steps and techniques of analysis and knowledge are very established, these days could one speak of one (or many) defined artistic methods in contemporary cultural practices?

Falke Pisano’s ‘Affecting Abstraction, Part Three’ explores the possibility of implementing a human presence in a hermetic abstract construction of language by performatively outlining how this could be achieved.

Casco Issues X: The Great Method is made possible by the generous support of the Mondriaan Foundation, Prins Bernhard Cultuurfonds and Gemeente Utrecht. Available through Casco and Revolver (www.revolver-books.de).

5/06/2007

Welcome to the cities of architects, welcome to the cities of politicians

This image comments my previous post (like a meta-commentary of it). This is a rather a recent image from the area of Bilbao, a picture taken (and appropriated) from the newspaper El País. The article was about the new Isozaki towers. But the polemis has been other: that about architect Santiago Calatrava complaining about the "new addition" to his own "arty" bridge... There has been a trial and it seems Calatrava is winning against Bilbao's city council.

This is an image I got from artist Jakob Kolding allready time ago. It features the public Jorge Oteiza's sculpture which stands in front of the town hall. Entitled "Variante ovoide de desocupación de la esfera" (2002), this monumental sculpture serves here as the principal motive for a promotional campaign of multinational clothing brand Carhartt. The sculpture holds a young man skating and there is also another hip cool guy passing by there. Of course these alements are artifically added to the image like in a kind of collage. In fact, it might be also a Jakob Kolding artwork in itself, but it is not. Rather it is as if someone from the design section of the company will follow Kolding's art. The background of the image also contains meaningfull information: this photograph is taken just before the construction of the two highrises by Arata Isozaki. The derricks are visible and somehow periodize the image of Bilbao, inmersed since more than a decade in an ininterrupted and endless renewal process. But it also comments Jakob Kolding's own work, like the posters he made in 2003 for D.A.E. Donostiako Arte Ekinbideak, one of then featuring a similar collage, street-skaters standing in front of another sculpture by Jorge Oteiza in San Sebastian. (Another detail represents a skater in Chillida's "Comb of the Winds"). All this reminds a lecture at the Guggenheim Museum in Autumm 2004, when showing the Kolding's collages and other contemporary "uses" of Basque myths such Oteiza, some architects felt irritated of such irrespetous treatments. Those architects are supposed to protect the meaning of ancient art, and they are blind to the fact that old art serves today for city branding and promotional campaigns of multinational brands.